Bio
John received his PhDEE from Stanford in 1977. He served as a line officer aboard destroyers in the US Navy from 1970 to 1974. In 1977 he joined ARGO Systems in Sunnyvale CA and then helped found Applied Signal Technology, Inc. in 1984 after serving for a year as an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering at Cornell University. Applied Signal Technology, now a mission area within the Space and Airborne Systems (SAS) business unit of Raytheon, Inc, designs and builds advanced signal processing equipment used by the United States government and its allies for foreign intelligence collection. For three years he was the president of the Raytheon Applied Signal Technology business unit and continues as the unit’s Chief Technical Officer. He was elected a Fellow in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1991. He was awarded the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Technical Achievement Award in 2000 and its first Industrial Leader Award in 2016.He is the President of the IEEE Foundation, and in 2016 he was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In 2019 he received the IEEE Signal Processing Society’s Norbert Wiener Society Award.
Session: The Effect of Entropy on the Choice of a Technical Career
This talk offers real world examples of how career success can occur even when your plan is nonexistent, or poorly formed, and when your judgements are ill-informed. Adding to that, sometimes totally unexpected events force a change in direction.